Manatee to Hippo to perfection!

My second of two more attempts to make cinnamon raisin swirl bread brought success! As you might recall reading in my last post about cinnamon raisin swirl bread the breads came out looking a bit like manatees. Adorable and tasty but not beautiful. I really wanted to make a beautiful bread.

The first of the two attempts didn’t rise properly. I’m certain that the water that I added was not the correct temperature. It was too cold. I knew it when it was going in but I thought that it wouldn’t be such a big deal. The recipe says to mix the wet ingredients separate from the dry ingredients. The yeast gets mixed with the flour, not directly with the water. So I assumed that the heat of the oven and the rising processes would make that happen. Uh, no. Another thing that I did differently I retarded the dough overnight in the refrigerator after I formed the loaves and put them in their pans. When I took them out the next morning I sat them in an oven that I had turned on, warmed up and turned off. I waited five hours for those loaves to rise and they never really did. Hope springs eternal- so I baked them anyway. You can see it did not go as I had hoped.

It never rose. It looks like a log.

This one looks like a yummy sleeping hippo. But not bread.

Two days later I decided to try it again. This time I paid careful attention to the temperature of the water, I did not retard the dough but let it rise 3 times and I baked the bread exactly as the recipe said. Another thing- I think this was the biggest issue starting with the very first Manatee loves–I changed loaf pans. The loaf pans with the Manatee and Hippo loves were larger than the pans that I used on the successful third try. I think the original loaf pan was so big that it couldn’t support the dough to shape properly when rising. Perhaps if I had used all of the dough for one loaf it would’ve worked in the larger pan. Nevertheless, mistakes were made and lessons were learned! HA! It’s wonderful to know that I can bake beautiful bread!